Holding Patterns
by Karla Linn Merrifield
1.
I hold you safely
by a tanka’s tight confines—
deliciously—
for we can come together
on the spicy here and now.
2.
I
hold
you yet
bodily
in Fibonacci
safety, perfectly boundaried.
3.
Encore! Encore! Unexpected encore
of holding you again, a kiss’s fleshy surprise
within the slinky five-lined skink
of a playful poem, on my flicking tongue:
you holding me again, how kiss of flesh surprises.
4.
Trust me, I’m containering your hold
to a scherzo.
5.
Holding you?
What?
Just
fuckin’ happily
in bondage of a piem.
Tight? Right!
6.
This:
the box
I cast us in
together, not
so much a looser hold
as one more expansive.
In an etheree I wrap
thigh-lengths of measured lines—heartbeats.
En fin, this exuberance is skin-deep.
7.
All I gotta do
is hold on, hold on—let go
till who fuckin’ knows.
Karla Linn Merrifield has had 1000+ poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has 15 books to her credit. Following her 2018 Psyche’s Scroll (Poetry Box Select) is the full-length book Athabaskan Fractal: Poems of the Far North from Cirque Press. Her newest poetry collection, My Body the Guitar, recently nominated for the National Book Award, was inspired by famous guitarists and their guitars and published in December 2021 by Before Your Quiet Eyes Publications Holograph Series (Rochester, NY). She is a frequent contributor to The Songs of Eretz Poetry Review. Web site: https://www.karlalinnmerrifield.org/; blog at https://karlalinnmerrifeld.wordpress.com/; Tweet @LinnMerrifiel; https://www.facebook.com/karlalinn.merrifield.
Red Wolf Journal 